At the second sentence of the first chapter in the book we already have a weasel-worded sentence that, if you were to remove the weaselly-ness of it and stand behind it as an assertion you mean, is pretty clearly factually incorrect.

> At a broad, functional level, AI architectures are beginning to resemble the architectures many consciousness scientists associate with conscious systems.

If you can find even a single published scientist who associates "next-token prediction", which is the full extent of what LLM architecture is programmed to do, with "consciousness", be my guest. Bonus points if they aren't already well-known as a quack or sponsored by an LLM lab.

The reality is that we can confidently assert there is no consciousness because we know exactly how LLMs are programmed, and nothing in that programming is more sophisticated than token prediction. That is literally the beginning and the end of it. There is some extremely impressive math and engineering going on to do a very good job of it, but there is absolutely zero reason to believe that consciousness is merely token prediction. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of machine consciousness categorically, but LLMs are not it and are architecturally not even in the correct direction towards achieving it.